“So we’ve got three fundamentally different messengers from the stars, Mr Feder. The past couple of years have given us several encouraging instances of receiving two messengers from the same event. If we ever receive all three messengers from the same event, that might give us what we need to solve the biggest problem in modern physics.”

“That’s a pretty deep statement, Moire. Care to unpack it? The geese here would love to hear about it.”

“Lakeside is a good place for thoughts like this. The first messenger was photons. We’ve been observing starlight photons for tens of thousand of years. Tycho Brahe and Galileo took it to a new level a few centuries ago with their careful observation, precision measurements and Galileo’s telescope.”

“That’s done us pretty good, huh?”

“Oh sure, we’ve charted the heavens and how things move, what we can see of them. But our charts imply there’s much we can’t see. Photons only interact with electric charge. Except for flat-out getting absorbed if the wavelength is right, photons don’t care about electrically neutral material and especially they don’t care about dark matter.”

“So that’s why we’re interested in the other messengers.”

“Exactly. Even electrically neutral things have mass and interact with the gravitational field. You remember the big news a few years ago, when our brand-new LIGO instruments caught a gravitational wave signal from a couple of black holes in collision. Black holes don’t give off photons, so the gravitational wave messenger was our only way of learning about that event.”

“No lightwave signal at all?”

“Well, there was a report of a possible gamma-ray flare in that patch of sky, but it was borderline-detectable. No observatory using lower-energy light saw anything there. So, no.”

“You’re gonna tell me and the geese about some two-messenger event now, right?”

“That’s where I’m going, Mr Feder. Photons first. Astronomers have been wondering for decades about where short, high-energy gamma-ray bursts come from. They seem to happen randomly in time and space. About a year ago the Fermi satellite’s gamma-ray telescope detected one of those bursts and sent out an automated ‘Look HERE’ alert to other observatories. Unfortunately, Fermi‘s resolution isn’t wonderful so its email pointed to a pretty large patch of sky. Meanwhile back on Earth and within a couple of seconds of Fermi‘s moment, the LIGO instruments caught an unusual gravitational wave signal that ran about a hundred times slower than the black-hole signals they’d seen. Another automated ‘Look HERE’ alert went out. This one pointed to a small portion of that same patch of sky. Two messengers.”

“Did anyone find anything?”

“Seventy other observatories scrutinized the overlap region at every wavelength known to Man. They found a kilonova, an explosion of light and matter a thousand times brighter than typical novae. The gravitational wave evidence indicated a collision between two neutron stars, something that had never before been recorded. Photon evidence from the spewed-out cloud identified a dozen heavy elements theoreticians hadn’t been able to track to an origin. Timing details in the signals gave cosmologists an independent path to resolving a problem with the Hubble Constant. And now we know where those short gamma-ray bursts come from.”

“Pretty good for a two-messenger event. Got another story like that?”

“A good one. This one’s neutrinos and photons, and the neutrinos came in first. One neutrino.”

“One neutrino?”

“Yup, but it was a special one, a super-high-powered neutrino whose incoming path our IceCube observatory could get a good fix on. IceCube sent out its own automated ‘Look HERE’ alert. The Fermi team picked up the alert and got real excited because the alert’s coordinates matched the location of a known and studied gamma-ray source. Not a short-burster, but a flaring blazar. That neutrino’s extreme energy is evidence for blazars being one of the long-sought sources of cosmic rays.”

“Puzzle solved, maybe. Now what you said about a three-messenger signal?”“Gravitational waves are relativity effects and neutrinos are quantum mechanical. Physicists have been struggling for a century to bridge those two domains. Evidence from a three-messenger event could provide the final clues.”

“Oh, yeah, you weren’t here when we started on this. So I was watching this program and they were talking about neutrinos and how there’s trillions of them going through like my thumbnail every second and then IceCube saw this one neutrino that they’re real excited about so what I’m wondering is, what’s so special about just that neutrino? How do they even tell it apart from all the others?”

“How about the direction it came from, Cathleen? We get lotsa neutrinos from the Sun and this one shot in from somewhere else?”

“An interesting question, Vinnie. The publicity did concern its direction, but the neutrino was already special. It registered 290 tera-electron-volts.”

“Ter-what?”

“Sorry, scientific shorthand — tera is ten-to-the-twelfth. A million electrons poised on a million-volt gap would constitute a Tera-eV of potential energy. Our Big Guy had 290 times that much kinetic energy all by himself.”

“How’s that stack up against other neutrinos?”

“Depends on where they came from. Neutrinos from a nuclear reactor’s uranium or plutonium fission carry only about 10 Mega-eV, wimpier by a factor of 30 million. The Sun’s primary fusion process generates neutrinos peaking out at 0.4 MeV, 25 times weaker still.”

“How about from super-accelerators like the LHC?”

“Mmm, the LHC makes TeV-range protons but it’s not designed for neutrino production. We’ve got others that have been pressed into service as neutrino-beamers. It’s a complicated process — you send protons crashing into a target. It spews a splatter of pions and K-ons. Those guys decay to produce neutrinos that mostly go in the direction you want. You lose a lot of energy. Last I looked the zippiest neutrinos we’ve gotten from accelerators are still a thousand times weaker than the Big Guy.”

I can see the question in Vinnie’s eyes so I fire up Old Reliable again. Here it comes… “What’s the most eV’s it can possibly be?” Good ol’ Vinnie, always goes for the extremes.

“You remember the equation for kinetic energy?”

“Sure, it’s E=½ m·v², learned that in high school.”

“And it stayed with you. OK, and what’s the highest possible speed?”

“Speed o’ light, 186,000 miles per second.”

“Or 300 million meters per second, ’cause that’s Old Reliable’s default setting. Suppose we’ve got a neutrino that’s going a gnat’s whisker slower than light. Let’s apply that formula to the neutrino’s rest mass which is something less than 1.67×10-36 kilograms…”“Half an eV? That’s all? So how come the Big Guy’s got gazillions of eV’s?”

“But the Big Guy’s not resting. It’s going near lightspeed so we need to apply that relativistic correction to its mass…“That infinity sign at the bottom means ‘as big as you want.’ So to answer your first question, there isn’t a maximum neutrino energy. To make a more energetic neutrino, just goose it to go even closer to the speed of light.”

“Musta been one huge accelerator that spewed the Big Guy.”

“One of the biggest, Al.” Cathleen again. “That’s the exciting thing about what direction the particle came from.”

“Like the North Pole or something?”

“Much further away, much bigger and way more interesting. As soon as IceCube caught that neutrino signal, it automatically sent out a “Look in THIS direction!” alert to conventional observatories all over the world. And there it was — a blazar, 5.7 billion lightyears away!”

“Wait, Cathleen, what’s a blazar?”

“An incredibly brilliant but highly variable photon source, from radio frequencies all the way up to gamma rays and maybe cosmic rays. We think the thousands we’ve catalogued are just a fraction of the ones within range. We’re pretty sure that each of them depends on a super-massive black hole in the center of a galaxy. The current theory is that those photons come from an astronomy-sized accelerator, a massive swirling jet that shoots out from the central source. When the jet happens to point straight at us, flash-o!”

“Duck!”

“I wouldn’t worry about a neutrino flood. The good news is IceCube’s signal alerted astronomers to check TXS 0506+056, a known blazar, early in a new flare cycle.”

Cathleen steps into at Al’s for her morning coffee-and-scone. “Heard you guys talking neutrinos so I’ll bet Al got you started with something about IceCube. Isn’t it an awesome project? Imagine instrumenting a cubic kilometer of ice, and at the South Pole!”

“Ya got me, Cathleen. It knocked me out that anyone would even think of building it. Where did the idea come from, anyhow?”

“I don’t know specifically, but it’s got a lot of ancestors, going back to the Wilson Cloud Chamber in the 1920s.”

“Oh, the cloud chamber! Me and my brother did one for the Science Fair — used dry ice and some kind of alcohol in a plastic-covered lab dish if I remember right, and we set it next to one of my Mom’s orange dinner plates. Spooky little ghost trails all over the place.”

“That’s basically what the first ones were. An incoming particle knocks electrons out of vapor molecules all along its path. The path is visible because the whole thing is so cold that other vapor molecules condense to form micro-droplets around the ions. Anderson’s cloud chambers were good enough to get him a Nobel Prize for discovering the positron and muon. But table-top devices only let you study low-energy particles — high-energy ones just shoot through the chamber and exit before they do anything interesting.”

“So the experimenters went big?”

“Indeed, Sy, massive new technologies, like bubble chambers holding thousands of gallons of liquid hydrogen or something else that reacts with neutrinos. But even those experiments had a problem.”

“They all depended on photography to record the traces. Neutrino-hunting grad students had to measure everything in the photos, because neutrinos don’t make traces — you only find them by finding bigger particles that were disturbed just so. The work got really intense when the astrophysicists got into the act, trying to understand why the Sun seemed to be giving off only a third of the neutrinos it’s supposed to. Was the Sun going out?”

“Wait, Cathleen, how’d they know how many neutrinos it’s supposed to make?”

“Wow, Vinnie, you sure know how to break up a narrative, but it’s a fair question. OK, quick answer. We know the Sun’s mostly made of hydrogen and we know how much energy it gives off per second. We’ve figured out the nuclear reactions it must be using to generate that energy. The primary process combines four hydrogen nuclei to make a helium nucleus. Each time that happens you get a certain amount of energy, which we know, plus two neutrinos. Do the energy arithmetic, multiply the number of heliums per second by two and you’ve got the expected neutrino output.”

“So is the Sun going out?”

“As usual, Al cuts to the chase. No, Al, it’s still got 5 billion years of middle age ahead of it. The flaw in the argument was that we assumed that our detectors were picking up all the neutrinos.”

“My mutations!”

“Yes, Vinnie. Our detector technology at the time only saw electron neutrinos. The Sun’s reactions emit electron neutrinos. But the 93-million mile trip to Earth gave those guys plenty of time to oscillate through muon neutrino to tau neutrino and back again. All we picked up were the ones that had gone through an integer number of cycles.”

“We changed technology, I take it?”

“Right again, Sy. Instead of relying on nuclear reactions initiated by electron neutrinos, we went so spark chambers — crossed grids of very fine electrified wire in a box of argon gas. Wherever a passing neutrino initiated an ionization, zap! between the two wires closest to that point. Researchers could computerize the data reduction. Turns out that all three neutrino flavors are pretty good at causing ionizations so the new tech cleared up the Solar Paradox, but only after we solved a different problem — the new data was point-by-point. Working back from those points to the traces took some clever computer programming.”

“Ah, I see the connection with IceCube. It doesn’t register traces, either, just the points where those sensors see the Cherenkov flashes. It’s like a spark chamber grown big.”

“Thanks, Jeremy, it’s nice to be back.. And the subject’s not an ice cube, it’s IceCube, the big neutrino observatory in the Antarctic.”

“Then I’m with Al’s question. Observatories have this big dome that rotates and inside there’s a lens or mirror or whatever that goes up and down to sight on the night’s target. OK, the Hubble doesn’t have a dome and it uses gyros but even there you’ve got to point it. How does IceCube point?”

“It doesn’t. The targets point themselves.”

“Huh?”

“Ever relayed a Web-page?”

“Sure.”

“Guess what? You don’t know where the page came from, you don’t know where it’s going to end up. But it could carry a tracking bug to tell someone at some call-home server when and where the page had been opened. IceCube works the same way, sort of. It has a huge 3D array of detectors to record particles coming in from any direction. A neutrino can come from above, below, any side, no problem — the detectors it touches will signal its path.”

Adapted from a work by Francis Halzen, Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin

“How huge?”

“Vastly huge. The instrument is basically a cubic kilometer of ultra-clear Antarctic ice that’s ages old. The equivalent of the tracking bugs is 5000 sensors in a honeycomb array more than a kilometer wide. Every hexagon vertex marks a vertical string of sensors going down 2½ kilometers into the ice. Each string has a couple of sensors near the surface but the rest of them are deeper than 1½ kilometers. The sensors are looking for flashes of light. Keep track of which sensor registered a flash when and you know the path a particle took through the array.”

“Why should there be flashes? I thought neutrinos didn’t interact with matter.”

“Make that, they rarely interact with matter. Even that depends on what particle the neutrino encounters and what flavor neutrino it happens to be at the moment.”

That gets both Al and me interested. His “Neutrinos come in flavors?” overlaps my “At the moment?”

“I thought that would get you into this, Sy. Early experiments detected only 1/3 of the neutrinos we expected to come from the Sun. Unwinding all that was worth four Nobel prizes and counting. The upshot’s that there are three different neutrino flavors and they mutate. The experiments caught only one.”

“Hoy, Vinnie, Jeremy’s question was first, and it bears on the others. Jeremy, you know that blue glow you see around water-cooled nuclear fuel rods?”

“Yeah, looks spooky. That’s neutrinos?”

“No, that’s mostly electrons, but it could be other charged particles. It has to do with exceeding the speed of light in the medium.”

“Hey, me and Sy talked about that. A lightwave makes local electrons wiggle, and how fast the wiggles move forward can be different from how fast the wave group moves. Einstein’s speed-of-light thing was about the wave group’s speed, right, Sy?”

“That’s right, Vinnie.”

“So anyhow, Jeremy, a moving charged particle affects the local electromagnetic field. If the particle moves faster than the surrounding atoms can adjust, that generates light, a conical electromagnetic wave with a continuous spectrum. The light’s called Cherenkov radiation and it’s mostly in the ultra-violet, but enough leaks down to the visible range that we see it as blue.”

“But you said it takes a charged particle. Neutrinos aren’t charged. So how do the flashes happen in IceCube?”

“Suppose an incoming high-energy neutrino transfers some of its momentum to a charged particle in the ice — flash! Even better, the flash pattern provides information for distinguishing between the neutrino flavors. Muon neutrinos generate a more sharp-edged Cherenkov cone than electron neutrinos do. Taus are so short-lived that IceCube doesn’t even see them.”

“I suppose muon and tau are flavors?”

“Indeed, Vinnie. Any subatomic reaction that releases an electron also emits an electron-flavored neutrino. If the reaction releases the electron’s heavier cousin, a muon, then you get a muon-flavored neutrino. Taus are even heavier and they’ve got their own associated neutrino.”

Al’s coffee shop, the usual mid-afternoon crowd of chatterers and laptop-tappers. Al’s walking his refill rounds, but I notice he’s carrying a pitcher rather than his usual coffee pot. “Hey, Al, what’s with the hardware?”

“Got iced coffee here, Sy. It’s hot out, people want to cool down. Besides, this is in honor of IceCube.”

“Didn’t realize you’re gangsta fan.”

“Nah, not the rapper, the cool experiment down in the Antarctic. It was just in the news.”

“Oh? What did they say about it?”

“It’s the biggest observatory in the world, set up to look for the tiniest particles we know of, and it uses a cubic mile of ice which I can’t think how you’d steer it.”

A new voice, or rather, a familiar one. “One doesn’t, Al.”“Hello, Jennie. Haven’t seen you for a while.”

“I flew home to England to see my folks. Now I’m back here for the start of the Fall term. I’ve already picked a research topic — neutrinos. They’re weird.”

“Hey, Jennie, why are they so tiny?”

“It’s the other way to, Al. They’re neutrinos because they’re so tiny. Sy would say that for a long time they were simply an accounting gimmick to preserve the conservation laws.”

“I would?”

“Indeed. People had noticed that when uranium atoms give off alpha particles to become thorium, the alpha particles always have about the same amount of energy. The researchers accounted for that by supposing that each kind of nucleus has some certain quantized amount of internal energy. When one kind downsizes to another, the alpha particle carries off the difference.”

“That worked well, did it?”

“Oh, yes, there are whole tables of nuclear binding energy for alpha radiation. But when a carbon-14 atom emits a beta particle to become nitrogen-14, the particle can have pretty much any amount of energy up to a maximum. It’s as though the nuclear quantum levels don’t exist for beta decay. Physicists called it the continuous beta-spectrum problem and people brought out all sorts of bizarre theories to try to explain it. Finally Pauli suggested maybe something we can’t see carries off energy and leaves less for the beta. Something with no charge and undetectable mass and the opposite spin from what the beta has.”

“Yeah, that’d be an accounting gimmick, alright. The mass disappears into the rounding error.”

“It might have done, but twenty years later they found a real particle. Oh, I should mention that after Pauli made the suggestion Fermi came up with a serious theory to support it. Being Italian, he gave the particle its neutrino name because it was neutral and small.”

“But how small?”

“We don’t really know, Al. We know the neutrino’s mass has to be greater than zero because it doesn’t travel quite as fast as light does. On the topside, though, it has to be lighter than than a hydrogen atom by at least a factor of a milliard.”

“Milliard?”

“Oh, sorry, I’m stateside, aren’t I? I should have said a billion. Ten-to-the-ninth, anyway.”

“That’s small. I guess that’s why they can sneak past all the matter in Earth like the TV program said and never even notice.”

This gives me an idea. I unholster Old Reliable and start to work.

“Be right with you… <pause> … Jennie, I noticed that you were being careful to say that neutrinos are light, rather than small. Good careful, ’cause ‘size’ can get tricky at this scale. In the early 1920s de Broglie wrote that every particle is associated with a wave whose wavelength depends on the particle’s momentum. I used his formula, together with Jennie’s upper bound for the neutrino’s mass, to calculate a few wavelength lower bounds.Momentum is velocity times mass. These guys fly so close to lightspeed that for a long time scientists thought that neutrinos are massless like photons. They’re not, so I used several different v/c ratios to see what the relativistic correction does. Slow neutrinos are huge, by atom standards. Even the fastest ones are hundreds of times wider than a nucleus.”

“With its neutrino-ness spread so thin, no wonder it’s so sneaky.”

“That may be part of it, Al.”

“But how do you steer IceCube?”

~~ Rich Olcott

Follow Blog via Email

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.